Andrew McLachlan (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I inform the Senate that the President has received the following letter, dated 26 February, from Senator Thorpe:

Pursuant to standing order 75, I give notice that today I propose to move "That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The policing, surveillance, criminalisation, and detention of First Peoples children is a humanitarian crisis and the youth carceral system is operating in breach of this country's human rights obligations. Children need culture, country, connection, and family, not prisons. The billions spent on police, prisons and surveillance must be urgently re-invested into First Peoples self-determined community programs and services to provide appropriate wrap-around support to women, children, and families.

Is the proposal supported?

More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

Lidia Thorpe (Victoria, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The policing, surveillance, criminalisation, and detention of First Peoples children is a humanitarian crisis and the youth carceral system is operating in breach of this country's human rights obligations. Children need culture, country, connection, and family, not prisons. The billions spent on police, prisons and surveillance must be urgently re-invested into First Peoples self-determined community programs and services to provide appropriate wrap-around support to women, children, and families.

Since 1991, 33 First Nations children have been killed in custody that we know of. My thoughts are with those families. Losing a child is something no-one should have to go through. There are 17 prisons for children across this country, where our babies, some as young as 10, are held in horrific conditions, being abused, starved and tortured, in breach of all human rights obligations. Over 50 per cent of these kids are First Nations, when we are just three per cent of the population. These babies are being torn away from culture, country and everything they know, too far away for family to visit. As said by Dylan Voller, a survivor of torture at Don Dale, said, these are kids:

… from a beautiful culture, the oldest continuing culture in the world, with so much to teach about how we can live in harmony together and with the land. But … their elders have been pushed aside by a government hungry for land and power.

… the Australian government uses brutality against children for their own political ends.

The National Children's Commissioner, Anne Hollonds, said that decades of evidence show that harsh punitive measures go against all recommendations from across the world and do not keep the community safer. In fact, the states with the toughest youth crime laws are the ones with the biggest problems. The Standing Council of Attorneys-General has a report, which is in the hands of all of the state governments, clearly stating that locking up children will only cause more harm to the community. We know increased punitive measures do nothing to address the underlying social issues, yet this so-called progressive Labor government have a few native police officers in their ranks. Your own Marion Scrymgour is making disgusting calls to treat our kids even more harshly, when they are already being openly hunted, locked up and tortured, and then Senator McCarthy is giving black money to the police dogs, adding to the billions of dollars being spent on this racist system every single year. Native police in your own ranks—shame!

Imagine if instead these billions on police stations and prisons and police surveillance were reinvested into First Peoples self-determined wraparound community services to support our women, children and families. We know this works. Children need culture, country, connection and family, not prisons. We're talking about 10-year-olds! It is beyond time for the federal government to show leadership, to commit to real justice reinvestment, to raise the federal age of criminal legal responsibility and to comply with the human rights obligations they signed up to.

Kerrynne Liddle (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Child Protection and the Prevention of Family Violence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There are actions the Prime Minister can take today to reduce the rates of children entering the youth justice system and for adults entering the justice system. To make a difference, you have to deal with domestic and family violence, and you have to deal with the issue of child protection and recidivism. It's not just the police, the courts and the prisons; it's everyone who has to take action here. It is parents being responsible for getting children to school and ensuring home is a safe haven, not somewhere of chaos and trauma from which they escape and inevitably find trouble.

The reality is that youth incarceration is in large part caused by a failing child protection system. Around 58,000 Indigenous children come into contact with child protection in any given year, and that number is going up. Around 22,000 Indigenous children are subject to child protection orders in any given year, and that number is going up. The Victorian Aboriginal Justice Agreement states that, of the Aboriginal children involved in the youth justice system, 81 per cent were victims of abuse, trauma or neglect, and 78 per cent experienced domestic and family violence. The Productivity Commission report of March 2020 recognises that most children are raised in loving, positive environments and that the risk of harm to children is exacerbated by a higher prevalence of other risk factors, such as poverty, unemployment, overcrowding, mental health issues, substance misuse and, of course, family violence. The link is undeniable. For adults, family violence results in greater risk of exposure to police, courts and prisons, too.

Indigeneity of itself does not condemn Indigenous people to a life of harm, crime and trauma. But for too many, that is their reality. It's the focus on those who need it most that should get our attention, and we should act on everything. It might be uncomfortable to talk about sexual abuse, coercive control, and physical and mental abuse. But talking about the hard stuff is what truth-telling is really about. Until we reduce the number of young people in the child protection system we won't be able to reduce the number of children behind bars. Indigenous children are 10.5 times more likely to be living in out-of-home care than non-Indigenous children, an overrepresentation of some 800 per cent. Most Indigenous children are taken into the system before they turn one year old, and the likelihood of their being returned home is bleak. In New South Wales, just 15.2 per cent return home.

Where it is safe to do so—and only where it is safe to do so, because the work has been done—children should be assisted to return to their families. This motion suggests redirecting money from police and prisons to an Indigenous corporation. I don't think that's the answer. Better-targeted funding, removal of duplication, accountability, and focus on outcomes not outputs are what's needed in greater measure. This also means an audit of services that deliver to the most vulnerable.

There is no doubt that irresponsible actions of ideologically driven politicians has also contributed to making an already bad situation worse. I'm referring to the removal of the cashless debit card in those communities that asked for a trial and the reckless lifting of alcohol bans in the Northern Territory. When spending on alcohol, drugs and gambling rather than on food, education and essentials occurs, the change for the most vulnerable is not for the better. In former trial site Bundaberg, the rate of domestic and family violence offences rose by 24 per cent. In former trial site Kalgoorlie-Boulder, breaches of violence restraint orders skyrocketed by 48 per cent. When I travelled to the region in January the shire councils, the shelters, the emergency frontline workers, the teachers and the locals told the same sad, sorry, shameful stories: more lives shattered, more demand for emergency services, more money needed to rebuild lives. The silent victims of this family and domestic violence epidemic are children and the most vulnerable. Sometimes those who were once innocent victims end up as perpetrators facing police, courts and our prisons.

Two years ago the Albanese government promised 500 new frontline community service workers to combat escalating family and domestic violence. To date they've delivered just two. I've yet to hear someone plausibly explain how an ice-skating rink in Alice Springs, painting roller shutters and supporting music festivals will change the lives of the most vulnerable. Senator Thorpe is right: all contributors to this issue need to be part of the solution. It's not one versus the other. There needs to be an improvement in the expectations of services delivered. (Time expired)

Jana Stewart (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to start by acknowledging Senator Thorpe for bringing the important issues impacting First Nations communities to this chamber today. It is indisputable that yes, children need culture, country and connection to family. It is indisputable that women, children and families need access to support services when and where they need them. And it is indisputable that families and community members need to have control over these programs and services. The evidence tells us that when Aboriginal people have a seat at the table our children are happier and our families are healthier. But this cannot be done by simply throwing money around. We must, above all else, empower First Nations communities.

On Gunditjmara country in south-west Victoria Winda-Mara Aboriginal Corporation is recognised as a progressive leader for positive change in the community. In 1990 a group of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community members came together on Gunditjmara country in south-west Victoria to discuss the needs and aspirations of the mob at the time. From that initial meeting, the attendees determined to form an Aboriginal community controlled organisation in Heywood focusing on addressing the housing, health, employment, child removal and education of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the region.

Winda-Mara has since celebrated its 30th birthday and continues to go from strength to strength. The organisation is now a well-respected Aboriginal community controlled organisation with over 85 staff, working from offices in Hamilton, Haywood and Portland in the south-west corner of Victoria. Winda-Mara manages medical centres and housing properties tenanted to Indigenous Victorians. Their work in the community services space includes supporting cultural strengthening, regional local justice, playgroup and youth mentoring programs. They also talk about having some of the lowest incarceration rates in the state because of what they do and how they do it. The team at Winda-Mara are passionate, kind and effective. They have high aspirations not just for First Nations people but for the entire region, and the determination to match it. Leaders like Uncle Mookeye, JB, Ben Church and Jason Walker are working to engage young people plus build opportunities for mob.

This year, construction will begin on Winda-Mara's new medical clinic in Heywood and a new integrated family services building. These developments not only will strengthen the quality of services provided to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community members—and other community members are welcome to use the service—but also will contribute to the regional economy at large. More construction in the regions means more jobs for builders, plumbers, sparkies and site managers. We must continue to build on the strength and resilience of First Nations people to achieve better outcomes because, after all, what's good for mob is good for all Australians.

Through justice reinvestment, the Albanese Labor government has invested a historic $91.5 million to enable a community led approach to prevent First Nations people coming into contact with the criminal justice system in the first place. We are also implementing a wide range of other measures to support communities, including working in partnership with First Nations people to deliver a new remote jobs and economic development program and establishing a national commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people to help achieve progress under the Closing the Gap agreement. I note that a commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children is something that mob have been asking for for a very, very long time.

In any conversation around supporting First Nations people we must look to the success of the deadly organisations already operating in this space and work with them to identify and remove barriers to further success. That pathway requires a strong emphasis on self-determination, trust and power sharing with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. It requires us to support and create pathways and remove barriers to economic participation and inclusion. It requires a long-term focus and commitment. It requires us to build mob up, not tear them down. I would say that most First Nations senators and members in this place have a shared commitment in wanting better for our communities, and referring to members and senators in this place in a derogatory way does nothing to advance that cause.

Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise in support of this motion brought by Senator Thorpe to this place today. We all know the crippling and absolutely unacceptable overrepresentation of First Nations people in our justice system. I want to share some of those statistics today. In the September 2023 quarter, there were 14,183 First Nations prisoners across Australia. This is an increase from the June 2023 quarter, when there were 14,011. More than a thousand more First Nations people are in prison than in the September 2022 quarter because of the actions of frontline responders and of police across this country—and they are at the heart of the problem.

I acknowledge some of the points that senators who have already spoken have made—that these are all interlinked, interconnected, with some of the issues we are seeing in closing the gap. But we also have three very specific targets—targets 10, 11 and 12—that have been set out for this federal government to do something about, and the cries from across this country about how we do that and how we achieve that are going to need bold action. We cannot continue to sit in this place and the other and push the responsibility back on the states and territories. Across all jurisdictions, governments are given hundreds of millions of dollars, particularly in the area of policing.

I have sat and listened to how this money can be spent better in our communities. I have worked in academia. I have worked in the research area. I have listened to community consultations about justice reinvestment. What people are saying isn't about giving more money to the police or to white NGOs in communities. It's about giving community an opportunity to do what they need to with diverting those youth and investing in our people and addressing some of those underlying social issues and social causes which are at the core of this—housing, education, employment, health care, access to the basic services and necessities in our communities. We are living in Third World conditions in some of our jurisdictions. I don't want to hear people say that we got running water because of colonisation. That is not true. You can't even drink the water that's running in some of the communities in my home state of Western Australia. So that's a farce. We need to give up that game and stop buying into that rhetoric.

I am all for defunding the police. I am absolutely in support of that. Get them back to their core function and let them own the title of colonial police forces in this country. Let them own that title, because that's what they were put in place for. That's truth-telling. Police forces in this country are doing their damnedest to not give us justice. Justice means that we are judged by our peers. We are not judged by our peers when there are white magistrates, white juries, in this country, who are continuing to do the job. They are not our peers. We need to think fundamentally about the role of the justice system. I am referring to this as the justice pipeline, and it needs to be dismantled. Senator Liddle is absolutely right: child protection plays such a huge part. We are only two or three generations from the stolen generation. In some households, like mine, we are only one generation away.

On rehabilitation versus punishment in this country: rehabilitation is not happening. The current system is not rehabilitating anybody; it's a revolving door. That's what's happening in our communities, and there sure as hell is no pathway to making sure that people are actually getting the support and the help that they need in these institutions. It is appalling. There is Banksia Hill. There is Unit 18 in Casuarina Prison in my home state, where they used a riot squad on a 16-year-old boy who had a health crisis—Cleveland Dodd, who was the first child to die in custody. This is shameful. It's a shame and a stain on our history. (Time expired)

Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Rates of incarceration are still too high. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are over-represented at every point in the justice system. So I thank Senator Thorpe for bringing the motion before the chamber today and I thank the other speakers who have contributed to the debate so far. We still have a lot of work to do to address that over-representation and, in particular, to help the young people who are affected in so many ways by the disadvantage that still afflicts so many Aboriginal communities. As the Prime Minister has said, by any standard the status quo is not working. We cannot keep doing the same thing expecting a different outcome. All levels of government will need to do better if we are to make progress.

At the heart of the national agreement underwriting closing the gap, there is a simple principle: the key to practical and sustainable change is ensuring that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are involved and empowered in the design and delivery of policies, programs and services that affect their lives, their families and their communities. We are determined to work with the Coalition of Peaks on structural changes to the way that governments work with communities—formal partnerships and shared decision-making, building the community-controlled sector, transforming government organisations so they work for everyone and sharing access to data and information so that we can work together to make the right decisions together and act on the evidence that's before us. If we can get these fundamental reforms right, we can make progress on the targets.

Now, the targets, as everyone here completely understands, reach across health, education, economic development, housing, infrastructure and justice, and we can't untangle the unacceptable rates of incarceration from these other measures and these other metrics. We also can't untangle them from the systems which are principally controlled by state and territory governments, including many of those systems associated with justice and policing. It's why colleagues are interested in speaking about justice reinvestment approaches, and it's why the government is interested in funding them and supporting them. They offer us the opportunity to provide an integrated response to the challenges faced by communities and to work with communities to identify how those responses should be organised and delivered. Justice reinvestment empowers First Nations communities and leaders to develop local solutions that divert people who are at risk away from the criminal justice system and, more importantly perhaps, provide the social and community underpinnings that support people to have happy, engaged, prosperous lives.

That's why the government has committed a historic $91.5 million to enable these community led approaches. We've named some of the first recipients in places where we seek to work: in Cowra, in Maningrida, in Groote Eylandt, in Central Australia, in Cherbourg, in Yarrabah, in Townsville, in Derby, in Balgo and, of course, in Halls Creek and in Alice Springs. It is the largest justice reinvestment commitment ever developed by the Commonwealth government. These approaches had been attempted elsewhere in a period when the Commonwealth government was not interested in engaging, and these programs are showing that they can work.

In my own home state, the Maranguka Justice Reinvestment Project in Bourke has been an incredibly important project, initiated and run by local people. Bourke has 3,000 residents, 20 per cent of whom identify as Aboriginal. In 2013, elders in the community decided that a new way of thinking and doing things was required. They initiated this project, designed to better coordinate support for families and kids and to operate as a community hub that is community led and can work in partnership with state governments and non-government agencies. The overarching goal is to decrease the rate of contact First Nations children and young people have with the criminal justice system. It works within the pillars of cultural authority, collaborative and flexible service delivery, shared decision-making, brokering of social solutions to systemic challenges and operationalising of First Nations data sovereignty, and it has had an impact—a 39 per cent reduction in the number of juveniles charged in the top five offence categories. We are committed to building on the successes that have been demonstrated— (Time expired)

Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Equal laws for all and special laws for none. Equal rights for all and special rights for none. This is the only acceptable position in a democracy that is free and fair. In a true democracy with true equality, arbitrary characteristics like race never determine the outcome in courts or from the enforcement of the law. In a true democracy there is no place for separate laws and courts based on race. In a true democracy, we are all equal before the law.

The activists who promote the Voice and the activists who claim exclusive Aboriginal sovereignty over Australia do not support equality or democracy. They despise equality and democracy. They despise reconciliation and national unity. They support the tyrannical politics of victimhood and grievance. They tried to insert this tyranny into the Constitution. They literally sit in this building, the seat of democracy in Australia, while attacking the principles upon which it was built. The hypocrisy is absolutely breathtaking.

Senator Thorpe says Indigenous Australian children need their families, not prisons. I agree. But they need functional families who teach respect for the law and for the police who enforce the law on behalf of their communities. They do not need dysfunctional families who neglect or abuse their children. This is what is happening in many remote Indigenous communities, in country towns, in major regional centres and in our big cities. Indigenous Australian children roam the streets, looking for trouble, because it's safer than being at home with their families.

This epidemic of abuse has been destroying the lives of countless Indigenous Australian children. Countless times, we've called for a royal commission into the sexual abuse. But everyone says, 'No, we don't need it.' It's an epidemic that the activists do not acknowledge exists—despite many Indigenous leaders in these communities desperately calling for help to end it—because, for the activists, if you're Indigenous, you can do no wrong. For them, if you're Indigenous, you should be above the laws that apply to the rest of Australia—except that is complete nonsense, because of one thing: democracy itself. Indigenous Australians have had as much say in the creation of our laws as every other Australian, thanks to democracy. It's keeping to the principles of democracy that will ultimately empower Indigenous Australians. It's keeping to the rule of law that will ensure justice ultimately prevails for all Australians, regardless of race.

David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I, first of all, want to commend the contribution from Senator Dorinda Cox, and I could begin and end this speech by saying what Senator Cox said in her clear statement of the need for First Nations peoples to be making decisions about their kids and about their communities, as the recipients of the resources of federal and state governments that are designed to be uplifting First Nations communities. That's what is absolutely needed in this space.

As this motion makes clear, justice reinvestment is not happening in this country. Justice reinvestment is meant to be taking money from prisons and police and putting it into the communities instead. No state government has, no territory government has, and never has the federal government taken money from the police and the prisons and actually put it into uplifting First Nations communities and put it where it's most needed: in those community-run organisations that know best how to look after their kids and their grandkids. We hear talk of justice reinvestment, but it's never about taking money away from the prisons and the police; it's always about giving more money for prisons and more money for police.

Just look at Queensland, at the growth in the number of First Nations kids in watch houses. Just look at the Northern Territory, where we'd find, if we checked, that pretty much every kid in jail there tonight would be a First Nations kid. And the numbers are shameful across the country.

So let's not spend more money on the prisons and the police and on putting more kids in jail. Let's spend money on Nelly's Healing Centre, in my home state of New South Wales. It's run by an incredible Gamilaraay and Birrbay woman, Helen Eason. I have seen the work she does—the families she saves; the kids she has kept with their families. Let's look at Grandmothers against Removals and the incredible work that those women are doing—First Nations women from my state and from across the country. And let's look at Abcare, on Gumbaynggirr land, which is keeping kids with families. Spend the money there, not on more cops and more prisons.

Marielle Smith (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the motion moved by Senator Thorpe be agreed to.